How Democracies Keep the Peace: Contextual Factors That Influence Conflict Management Strategies

Some studies find that democratic states are more amenable to third party forms of conflict management, while other studies indicate that democracies are able to resolve contentious issues on their own through bilateral negotiations. Using data from the Issue Correlates of War (ICOW) Project, the authors investigate peaceful and militarized conflict management strategies that democratic states employ to resolve contentious issues. Theoretically, the authors focus on how militarized conflict history, relative capabilities, and issue salience influence the tools of conflict management that democratic states employ. Empirical analyses suggest that democratic dyads employ bilateral negotiations more often to resolve contentious issues when the issue has been militarized previously, when the issue is more salient, and when they are facing an equal adversary. Democratic dyads seek out non-binding third party settlement more frequently in situations of power preponderance than non-democratic dyads, although binding forms of third party settlement occur most often in relatively equal democratic dyads. Pairs of democracies are more likely to employ militarized conflict management strategies when they have resorted to force over the issue previously, when the issue is highly salient, and when they are evenly matched. This paper was prepared for the American Political Science Association Conference, Boston, MA, August 28-31, 2008. We thank Paul Hensel and John Vasquez for comments on a previous version of the paper. Over the last decade, the phenomenon known as the democratic peace has received a considerable amount of attention in the International Relations literature. The main tenet of this theory is well known: democracies seldom, if ever, go to war with each other (e.g. Bueno de Mesquita and Lalman 1992; Maoz and Russett 1993), although democratic states may be equally likely to participate in wars as nondemocracies (Chan 1997; Ray 1995, 2000). These empirical observations, supported in a wide variety of studies, have spurred a rather rich quest to ascertain why the dyadic democratic peace exists. A number of possibilities have been posited, including shared norms of compromise and cooperation (Dixon 1993, 1994; Maoz and Russett 1993; Mitchell 2002), institutional constraints (Bueno de Mesquita and Lalman 1992; Bueno de Mesquita et al 1999, 2003; Morgan and Schwebach 1992), capitalistic market prosperity (Mousseau 2000; Hegre 2000), economic interdependence (e.g. Russett and Oneal 2001), and joint involvement in international organizations (Russett and Oneal 2001). The fact that democratic states don’t fight wars against each other is not to say they don’t have their share of disagreements. There has been no shortage of them, and sometimes they involve military forces. Examples include a series of clashes between Canada and the United Kingdom over the ownership of Labrador during the 1920s, the “Cod War” between Great Britain and Iceland, and the 1997 “Salmon War” between the U.S. and the Canadian province of British Columbia. Mitchell and Prins (1999) document close to 200 militarized democratic disputes between 1946 and 1992. The difference between clashes by joint democratic dyads and other dyads is that the former do a much better job of preventing escalation to the most serious confrontation level, interstate war. Militarized disputes between democracies are more likely to end in compromise (Mousseau 1998) and with negotiated settlements (Dixon and Senese 2002). Furthermore, there have been only a handful of militarized disputes between two democracies that have resulted in any fatalities (Mitchell and Prins 1999; Wayman 2002). 1 Some studies present empirical evidence for a monadic democratic peace as well. See for example Benoit (1996), Huth and Allee (2002), Keller (2005), Leeds and Davis (1999), and Rummel (1983). 2 Ironically, while good at preventing escalation, democracies do not do such a good job of terminating lower-level disputes among themselves (Mitchell and Prins 1999). Senese (1997) finds that once in a militarized dispute, jointly democratic dyads are just as likely to escalate the dispute to uses of force short of war.